Trip to Theater Worth an Extra Pence : London playgoing: Richard Harris and Derek Jacobi give performances that the stage is made for. The latest Alan Ayckbourn has a dazzlingly nasty premise.

Inflation is as universal as Burger King and Pizza Hut, which now raise their garish facades everywhere in the land of Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and Christopher Wren.

Memory, which does have a merry way of telescoping 30 years into several fewer than that, says that a pound or two or three got you a good seat at any London play. That was within 10 bucks, and the memory was old but accurate. The scale here is still better than in New York, where I recently paid $50 for a balcony seat to “City of Angels” and $45 for an equally distant view of Maggie Smith.

I winced, but in the end didn’t care because both evenings were magical experiences. A few evenings ago here, it cost the equivalent of $30 to see Richard Harris in Luigi Pirandello’s “Henry IV” and about the same to see Derek Jacobi in Jean-Paul Sartre’s reworking of “Kean” by Alexandre Dumas pere . Those were orchestra seats. I spent $18 to see Alan Ayckbourn’s “Man of the Moment” from the far reaches of the balcony.

Two out of three wasn’t bad, having nothing to do with price.

Harris and Jacobi, in plays that are both studies of illusion and reality and the wavery line that divides genius from madness, give the kind of all-stops, whispery-thundery, state-of-the-actor’s-art performances that the stage is made for and that the customers willingly pay the price to see.

In the Pirandello, the time is more or less now--the civilian sane arrive in street dress or evening garb--but Harris is acting out a yearslong charade as Henry IV of Germany, dead these many centuries. There is a throne, helmeted guards in attendance, though they sneak the odd cigarette when no one is looking.

Is he mad, or too sane to accept the pains of the memories that go with sanity? Harris, imperious and childish, arms frozen in gestures of the deranged, voice a roar or a squeak, histrionic and then coldly, accusingly logical, is an astonishment. What makes the portrayal so telling is his sharp control. He may be the madman acting, or the sane man feigning madness, or the sane man finally gone mad to stay. But he is never the actor acting merely to display his gifts. It is a breathtaking display by an actor who has always been powerful (remember “This Sporting Life”?) but seldom so perfectly disciplined.

Edmund Kean (born 1787 or thereabouts, died 1833) was a legendary Shakespearean actor. Another legendary Shakespearean, Philip Kemble, on seeing Kean’s Othello, was said to have said, “I did not see Mr. Kean; I saw Othello; and further I shall not play the part again.”

As Dumas, Sartre and Jacobi portray him, Kean is a roistering swinger in a tradition later to be sustained, let’s say, by John Barrymore. More than in Barrymore, however, the line between the player and the role played, between the illusion and the reality, grows ever thinner, like the line between genius and madness, which Harris has been treading like a frayed tightrope. (There are pre-echoes, so to speak, of Albert Finney as the old trouper, at the end of his storms, in Ronald Harwood’s “The Dresser.”)

In the end, Jacobi, whose Kean has been witty, dashing, grandiose, a wonderful roarer, is a poignant, even pathetic, confusion figure, probably mad, as Kean seems to have been at the end. Kemble’s comment (not in the text) is cruelly apt; if the audience has taken Kean as Othello, then who at last is Kean, and does he exist? It is an existential question, as Sartre intended it to be.

It is also a marvelous occasion of theater, with a wistful quartet (violin, accordion, clarinet and cornet) in clownish costumes playing the entr’actes and setting a tone at once mocking and melancholy.

Jacobi, who has been so good so often, can never have displayed more of his reach as an actor.

The awesomely prolific Alan Ayckbourn’s latest play, “Man of the Moment,” is a comedy upon television, and television’s way of creating its own reality to suit its own needs, regardless of whatever the true reality of a situation may be.

A ruthlessly ambitious producer is launching a series about reunions. The first confronts a bank robber with the teller who defied him during a robbery 17 years earlier. The robber subsequently wrote a repenting bestseller and is now a TV talk-show host.

It is a dazzlingly nasty premise, not least because the robber is now a millionaire, vacationing in snarling opulence on Majorca, where the play takes place. The bank teller is still little better than a clerk, married to the once-beautiful woman who worked beside him in the bank and was savagely disfigured by the robber’s shotgun blast.

The clerk, who seems fatuously accepting and uncomplaining of the world as it is, injustices and all, was originally played by Michael Gambon (“The Singing Detective”) and you could only wish to have seen how he handled it.

As it is, the play is nearing the end of its run; the crowd was sparse. The feeling was one I’ve had in the past when touring companies limp into Los Angeles from Des Moines or Grand Junction, the jokes broadened to reach the dimmest customer in the crowd, the subtleties of text long since swept into the wings.

“Man of the Moment” builds up a certain plot tension: Surely the worm will turn and the vile TV man will get his comeuppance. Well, yes and no, depriving us of the satisfaction a farce--which this is--can provide. But television, and its self-absorption with its own technical and editorial needs, to the exclusion of all else, gets off almost unscathed, a worthy target hit with a whipped cream pie instead of an arrow.

It’s hard to know whether to blame Nigel Planer, a well-regarded actor who followed Gambon, or the Ayckbourn text, which gives him so little chance to suggest the wrath beneath the wimp.